Field of Invention
This invention relates to contacting a target person, more particularly to contacting a target person via known and unknown references.
Description of Prior Art
People's connections are very important in both private and business world. As it is said, in a lot of occasions, the person you know may be more important than what you know. But the reality is we have our own social circles that provide only limited social contacts. One way to find more connections is to know friends' friends. We could ask our friends to introduce us to another circle; or as enabled nowadays, we may be able to see our friend's contacts at some social networking websites. But asking a friend for his or her friends is inconvenient and may cause awkward or even unpleasant situation. Letting others, even friends, to view own contacts might be equally awkward and uneasy, let alone privacy concerns.
Therefore, there exists a need to contact friend's friend in a way that is less uneasy and protects privacy in the meantime.
A person's direct contact may be called first layer reference, with one degree of separation as known in the field. Friend's direct contact may be called second layer reference, with two degrees of separation. Current method to contact a target person relies on friends and friend's friends, assuming he or she happens to be the contact of either friend or friend's friend. In practice as available at some social networking websites, a contact of friend's friend is the farthest a requester could go because of privacy and trust issues. So any target person in the fourth, fifth, or higher layer would become out of reach. Thus, the availability of target person is limited by the first and second layer references of a requester.
Therefore, there exists a need to make more target persons available for a requester to connect with.